We’re celebrating International Women’s Day 2026 this year by showcasing six individuals who are helping to shape Australia’s geospatial sector.
It’s well understood that women are still highly under-represented at most levels and in most sub-sectors of the geospatial community. The situation has been improving over recent years, but slowly, so plainly there is still a long way to go.
Study after study has shown that workplaces that are more gender diverse, are more innovative and successful. So, it behoves everyone in the geospatial community to do their bit, however small, to encourage more women to take up geospatial careers and champion them when they do. Everyone will benefit.
For International Women’s Day (IWD) this year, we reached out to six professionals to showcase their wide variety of backgrounds, professional interests, experiences and passions. We’re very grateful to them for enthusiastically agreeing to have their stories told.
So we invite you — in fact, we strongly encourage you — to learn more about them and their careers by clicking on each of the following links to read their full, individual interviews:
- Charlie-Elle McCarthy, a geospatial intelligence analyst with the Royal Australian Air Force;
- Shokoufeh Farhadi, a research student at the University of NSW;
- Danielle Wright, a remote sensing analyst with Victoria’s Country Fire Authority;
- Phoebe Davis, surveyor and spatial specialist;
- Cherie Malone, founder of CocoTell, a Townsville-based geospatial consultancy; and
- Leyla Alpaslan, Head of Geoscience Australia’s Digital Earth Branch.
You might also like to read our recent profile of Ensiyeh Javaherian Pour, whom we interviewed for this year’s International Day of Women and Girls in Science.
And there are our recent interviews with Melissa Harris, CEO of Geoscience Australia, and Allison Kealy, Interim CEO of the SHIELD CRC bid.
And you can always check out our IWD interviews from the last few years:
